Stablecoins have quietly surpassed Visa! The annual transaction volume is 27.6 trillion and will reach 46 trillion in 2025 - stablecoins are becoming the "new artery" for global capital flows.

Original author：加密头条

Original source：https://www.youtube.com/embed/e3X9_0g-8o8

The video provides a macro interpretation of the global landscape of the stablecoin industry in 2026 from the dual perspectives of senior blockchain investors and financial analysts. The core conclusion is that stablecoins have crossed the double threshold of regulatory legality and technical feasibility, but the "flowers blooming everywhere" form is still evolving and is far from complete. Judging from the data, the total market value of stablecoins in the first quarter of 2026 exceeded US$315 billion, a record high, with quarterly transaction volume reaching US$28 trillion and annualized transaction volume of approximately US$17.2 trillion, surpassing Visa's annual settlement volume. USDT still occupies nearly 60% of the market share with a scale of about 190 billion US dollars, but it has experienced quarterly supply contraction for the first time; USDC has bucked the trend and grown to about 78 billion US dollars, continuing to expand in compliance and institutional scenarios. The in-depth involvement of traditional financial and technology giants such as BNY Mellon, BlackRock, PayPal, and Ripple has officially transformed stablecoins from crypto-native narratives into mainstream financial discussions. From the perspective of the institutionalization process of supervision, 2025 to 2026 constitute the "first year of supervision" - the GENIUS Act of the United States, the EU's MiCA are fully implemented, and the first batch of stable currency licenses are issued in Hong Kong. The three major jurisdictions completed the implementation of the framework almost simultaneously. Mainland China continues to pursue a digital renminbi strategy and explicitly prohibits stablecoins. This global differentiation at the institutional level indicates that stablecoins will assume completely different functional roles in different jurisdictions. From the perspective of the evolution of application scenarios, stablecoins are migrating from "encrypted internal circulation" to real economic scenarios, but the penetration rate is highly uneven. Spontaneous dollarization adoption in cross-border B2B and emerging markets is the most mature, while local retail payments are still in the early stages of "hybrid mode". Bot activity accounting for about 76% also suggests that there is a lot of noise behind the transaction volume. JPMorgan Chase used the "speed mechanism" framework to warn that the annual transaction volume of 17.2 trillion US dollars is not equivalent to a proportional expansion of the market size. The market value is expected to be in the range of 500 to 600 billion US dollars in 2028; a16z emphasized that stable coins will eventually be upgraded to "programmable currencies", and the final blue ocean for growth is the automatic settlement scenario in the AI ​​agent economy. The two sets of narratives complement rather than oppose each other over time. Finally, it needs to be emphasized that behind the market value of stablecoins exceeding US$300 billion is essentially an institutional expansion of the US dollar’s ​​digital hegemony—98% of the world’s stablecoins are anchored to the US dollar. Whether policymakers, investors or practitioners, they should incorporate this geo-economic dimension into their core judgment framework, rather than understanding this evolving monetary revolution only from the single perspective of payment efficiency or return on investment.